BERKELEY: Post-mortem critiques of the Trump-Kim agreement suggest that the net winner was China while Donald Trump was bamboozled into unreciprocated concessions by…
BERKELEY: Post-mortem critiques of the Trump-Kim agreement suggest that the net winner was China while Donald Trump was bamboozled into unreciprocated concessions by the crafty Kim Jong Un.
To understand the wider implications of the summit, we should understand China’s essential geostrategic interest in Korea.
CHINA’S DEEP INTERESTS IN NORTH KOREA
Obviously North Korea shares a 1,420km border with China. China played an indispensable role in the birth of a separate Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and successfully fought to defend it when its existence was threatened by US General Douglas MacArthur’s 1950 outflanking counterattack.
China’s relations with North Korea remained warm through the early part of the Cold War and cooled after commencement of the Sino-Soviet dispute in 1956, creating opportunity for Pyongyang to play the two against each other over the next decade.
While China withdrew its last troops from the North in 1958, it has maintained and renewed its only mutual defence alliance with North Korea.
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FROM THE KOREAN WAR TO OUTREACH IN THE 1990S
From China’s perspective, its intervention in the Korean War was a necessary holding action. The 1953 truce left in place a reasonably stable alliance structure, with South Korea allied to the US and North Korea allied to the People’s Republic of China and the Soviet Union.
Yet the regime in the south posed continuing existential threat to the North, not just due to ideology but also the “divided nation” syndrome drawing them ambivalently together.
The economic “Miracle on the Han”, taking off under Park Chung-hee in the early 1970s, destabilised the peninsular power balance with the South’s GDP growing up to 30 times larger than the North’s, followed by military modernisation leaving Pyongyang behind.
China under Deng Xiaoping soon adopted its own East Asian miracle model and urged North Korea to follow suit, but the ideologically orthodox Kims renounced “revisionism.”
At the end of the 1980s, South Korea under Roh Tae-woo brought this growing asymmetry to a strategic head with Nordpolitik, combining outreach to the North with diplomatic overtures to North Korea’s core supporters, China and the USSR.
While Pyongyang spurned the South’s demarche, Moscow and Beijing proved more receptive. In the early 1990s, both recognised South Korea.
Kim Il Sung was furious, threatening to recognise Taiwan to punish Beijing. Without diplomatically realistic options in a cratering economy, he focused attention on covert nuclear weapons development.
ASTOUNDING PROGRESS IN NORTH KOREA’S NUCLEAR PROGRAMME
Hitherto content to allow North Korea to reap the consequences of its ill-conceived priorities, the West was rudely awakened by the International Atomic Energy Agency’s 1992 discovery of a nuclear developmental programme and equally astounded by its swift progress.
Not every country was equally concerned. Most alarmed was the United States, as architect and custodian of the Northeast Asian status quo.
South Korea was only indirectly affected by a nuclear North Korea’s potential impunity, as nuclearisation did not basically affect the bilateral balance of power – the North already posed a credible threat to Seoul via conventional artillery and rocketry deployed just north of Seoul.
